'Black Tom Tyrant'? Or a Man of Many Hues?:

J. F. Merritt. Ed. 1996. The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford 1621-41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiv + 293 pp. ISBN 052160411

1. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford was both an exceptional figure and a paradigm of the workings of seventeenth century politics. He is also a personification of the different perceptions of that age -- the different perceptions of contemporaries and later historians. 'Black Tom Tyrant' was, after all, the minister whose death Charles I repented to the grave; his execution marked a crucial moment in the origins of violent civil war. Divisions about Wentworth were and are ideological as well as historical disagreements.

2. Most of the early studies of Wentworth, including the typically astute judgment of Gardiner, suffered from the unavailability of the vast Strafford archive at Wentworth Woodhouse and consequent reliance upon the selective editions of Strafford's letters and papers by William Knowler. 1 The beginnings of the exploitation of that archive, by Julia Merritt and others, and our contemporary historiographical moment after the debates over revisionism, make timely a reconsideration of Wentworth's career: or rather a series of investigations which eschew the simple either/or options of earlier work and open up the man (and the period) in all their complexities.

3. As with all collections of essays, The Political World of Wentworth, is uneven. None of the pieces is thin or uninteresting; but where some seem stuck in old agendas or illuminate only small episodes, the best throw new and brighter light on the political culture of Stuart England that we are only just beginning to comprehend and configure.

4. To begin with those of more limited scope, Tom Cogswell returns to the foreign policy debate in the parliament of 1621 and reasserts his claim that the majority of the Commons were enthusiastic for war against Spain and generous in their aid. It was James I, he maintains, who dampened their belligerent passion by temporising or pressing a limited action in the Palatinate, rather than the diversionary war in the Indies for which the Commons called. As with his earlier work, Cogswell is persuasive about the widespread desire for action, but less convincing about the realism of those who sought it. (cf. Cogswell 1989) A benevolence of £80-90,000 towards the Palatinate scarcely counts as giving 'handsomely' in the context of Habsburg imperial might, and James was surely right to be sceptical about whether parliament would ever vote the supply for an effective campaign. Cogswell too easily follows the warmongers in the view that the most effective campaign, the 'natural' strategy, was a war of diversion in the Caribbean, and is too unwilling to discern the likelihood of James's fear that what would ensue anyway was 'a public war of religion through all the world at once.' (Meritt 1996, 45, 41, 28) The desire in seventeenth century parliaments for a war against Spain was like the desire for a better health service in twentieth-century politics: one that was heart felt but stopped short of the necessary action.

5. Conrad Russell is therefore quite right to defend his position against Cogswell on this count. Anti-Spanish rhetoric, as he says, does not need further documentation; the question was the extent to which it translated into action -- or supply. More controversially Russell revises the suggestion that in his lukewarm response to anti-Spanish rhetoric Wentworth may have been more typical than is assumed and that Cogswell may have exaggerated even the desire for conflict. This, as he admits, is a question hard to resolve when only a handful spoke, but even in those few cases 'we disagree...about the textual reading of some of the most crucial speeches.' (Merritt 1996, 50) Ironically, however, neither Russell nor Cogswell subject any of the speeches to rhetorical analysis nor consider their playing to the silent backbenchers (or wider public sphere) -- nor, by contrast, the way the views of members in turn shaped such rhetoric. This is a widespread failing of revisionist work on parliaments. 2 Rather than taking up the new insights and possibilities of post-revisionism, Russell archly rehearses his earliest revisionist work in a manner that invites his critics to think is self-parody. Surely we have moved on from here.

6. One way in which we have moved on is a departure from the obsession with parliaments which characterised revisionist no less than Whig historiography, to the beginning of study of court politics and patronage. In a painstakingly careful investigation of a moment, a method bequeathed by revisionism to all its successors, Brian Quintrell reexamines the competition for the Lord Treasurership that opened on the death of Weston. The eventual outcome, the appointment of William Juxon, Bishop of London, has usually been claimed (not least by the archbishop himself) as a victory for Laud, and for the 'Church Triumphant' as he put it. Quintrell argues that Juxon owed nothing to Laud who was himself a candidate, and that his appointment was due to his ability to work with Cottington and Windebank, most of all to the impression he had made on Charles I himself. The case is carefully argued, the doubts about Laud's promotion of Juxon well aired. But in the end the view that Laud was desperate for the job himself fails to convince.

7. It was not only Laud who insisted on his reluctance to take such office: Wentworth, in a letter not here cited, believed 'he will aspire to be absolute in church affairs...but in truth I think no further.' 3 More generally, Quintrell's vignette misses the opportunity to cast broader light: he says nothing about faction (or its limited use as an historical label) or the larger questions of jockeying for appointment and place, the political process in general.

8. Julia Merritt herself essays such wider questions in examining Wentworth as a case study in the politics of absence. Ever since David Starkey's revolution in court studies, access has been seen as the essence of political advancement and influence. (See Starkey 1987; cf. Sharpe 1986) Merritt qualifies this by urging the place of correspondence in securing influence, even suggesting that in Wentworth's case it proved more effective than his personal presence at court. There is a useful corrective here: correspondence could be an effective second best to presence, and letters to and from the king were symbols of standing and power. But Wentworth's correspondence -- to the king, Laud and others -- makes it clear that it was never a substitute. The Lord Deputy's insecurity about the practices of rivals and enemies in his absence was not mere paranoia: if Quintrell is right even Laud hid from him his most secret designs. As Merritt admits, absence licensed rumour and misinformation which Wentworth's enemies made use of to his disadvantage. For all his authority in Ireland, Wentworth regarded the Lord Lieutenancy as a base from which to advertise his abilities and talents for royal service and proximity to the king in England where, as he saw it, the important decisions were taken. Whatever his limited success when he returned to England in 1639 (a success surely limited by the hand he was dealt) it was only in the late 1630s that Wentworth exercised any real influence over policy and action. (cf Sharpe 1992, 132-140, 837-842) Counsel, the essence of early modern monarchical government, a concept not discussed here, presumed presence, and it was their fear of his influence on Charles's counsels that led Wentworth's enemies to pursue him to his death.

9. Wentworth's career in Ireland, has neither been totally neglected, nor entirely separated from events in England. To some, his Irish policies were a blueprint for England, and the concerns they roused fuelled the fears of the opposition that led him to the scaffold. Recently, however, some scholars have gone beyond a recognition of such correctives to argue for a new British history and for the civil war as the outcome of a British problem, the governing of multiple kingdoms. (Russell 1992) Three essays here take up Wentworth's Irish career, with varying enthusiasm and support for the 'New British History'. John McAfferty writes about Wentworth, Bramhall and the Irish Convocation of 1634, as a case study of a larger shift in Anglo-Irish relations. He shows that whilst Ussher fought to retain a 'godly base' for the Irish church and a measure of independence, Bishop Bramhall endeavoured to ensure 'the greatest uniformity with England.' Though minor concessions for the sake of peace were made, Bramhall won out through the support of Wentworth and Laud (whose correspondence with Bramhall is used here for the first time). Not only did their support transform the church in Ireland, McAfferty maintains, 'Under Laud and Wentworth haphazard and incidental attention to Ireland was transformed into sustained attention and unprecedented interference.' (Merritt 1996, 192, 199) While the limited case is made, this is a rather dense essay that needed opening and developing. We needed to know more about the nature and extent of Laud's commitment to a three kingdoms policy, and its relation to the views of Charles I who, John Morrill has argued, pursued no program of anglicization. (See Morrill 1994) More important still, we need to know more about the intentions behind the religious policies of Wentworth who by no means shared all of Bramhall's, or Laud's ecclesiastical preferences. 4 Jane Ohlmeyer, the liveliest of the young exponents of British history, focusses on an issue that very much brought interests in England and Ireland together: the plantation at Londonderry. In 1635, as a result of a Star Chamber trial, Charles took back for the crown lands previously gifted to the City of London to create a Protestant colony and market economy. Rejecting bids from a number of courtiers, and other entrepreneurs, (the Marquis of Hamilton, Antrim, Sir John Clotworthy and Wentworth himself), Charles placed the lands with commissioners who exploited the lands and inhabitants. Though he opposed royal policy in this, Strafford was blamed for the bungle and the opposition of Hamilton, Clotworthy and the City was crucial in the story of his downfall. In playing a decisive part in Strafford's attainder, Ohlmeyer argues, 'men of the three kingdoms' with 'vested interests throughout the Stuart archipelago' became leading actors in the drama of civil war. (Merritt 1996, 227) Ohlmeyer is entirely persuasive in arguing that the Londonderry business involved participants from and the interests of three kingdoms. So did the Caroline Fishing Association, and for that matter the Darnley marriage to Mary Queen of Scots. The question remains whether such episodes and moments, in which interests in a number of kingdoms come together or contrast, compels a new British history which, presumably, assumes that a narrative of one nation history lacks meaning without the wider history of the archipelago. Here doubt is cast not only by an Anglocentric sceptic such as Peter Lake, but by a leading Irish historian, Nicholas Canny. 5 Neither Lake nor Canny doubt the interaction of English, Irish and Scottish histories. What Canny questions is whether Stuart monarchs ever had a British policy: 'British monarchs frequently proceeded as if each kingdom was a self-contained entity and only occasionally treated the three monarchies as a single political jurisdiction.' (Merritt 1996, 185) In a damaging critique of Russell's recent work, he reminds the founder of the new British history that he falls into the danger of implying that social and economic conditions in the three kingdoms were the same, and that developments in the one would have similar consequences in the other. This is the crux. England, Scotland and Ireland were entirely different societies, with different economies, social practices, histories and politics. Moreover each had different strategic and diplomatic needs and problems, different continental contacts and alliances. In so far as the new British history diverts the historian's attention from Europe, from the vital relations of England (and Ireland and Scotland) with Spain and France and the Netherlands, it threatens a 'little Britisher' historiography which may impoverish rather than enrich our understanding.

10. More promising than the fashion for British history is the move in the age after revisionism to a new political history, a broader engagement with political culture and an expanded conception of politics itself. Something of this initiative informs several of the essays in this volume, for one Anthony Milton's interesting use of Wentworth as a point of entry into the political thought of the personal rule. Milton has a clear and important case to argue. Where Dr. Glenn Burgess, concentrating on the public discourse of speech and pamphlet, stressed the shared language of political debate, and even the conservative theories of Charles I and his ministers, Milton discerns beneath the public rhetoric a more sinister and absolutist private agenda. (Burgess 1992 and now Burgess 1996) 'The regular claims by Charles and his ministers that the rule of law and the rule of prerogative were intimately related might appear to some as a recognition of the legal restraints on the king's prerogative, but could be read just as easily as an attempt by the prerogative to lay claim to the rhetorical force of the law, and also to make the law dependent on the king.' (Merritt 1996, 141) That the second was a legitimate reading and fear Milton seeks to demonstrate from scrutiny of Wentworth's private letters and locutions. His attitudes to the Irish parliament, he suggests, reveals Wentworth's '"absolutist" style within apparently traditional language', as his advice in 1640 that in the event of parliamentary non-cooperation Charles was 'absolved from rules of government' threatened novel courses. The Wentworth who read Bodin in his travels developed perhaps a theory of indivisible sovereignty which was one of the 'radical ideas' that lay behind the Caroline stress on law, tradition and custom.

11. This is one of those stimulating essays that is also misjudged and almost certainly wrong. There can be no doubt that with experience of government and in certain circumstances, especially military crisis in 1640, Wentworth was prepared to advocate measures that, to say the least, sat uneasily with traditional courses. But as Richard Cust has shown, Sir John Coke in the 1620s did the same. (Cust 1987, 33-4, 68-79, 75-6) The problem of the early modern polity was that for many, not least for the parliamentary regimes of the 1640s, the needs of defence and government at times strained the ideals of symbiotic harmony between prerogative and common law. Wentworth, however, did not see any need to change the constitution: in private as well as public he spoke of his commitment to 'ancient ways.' (Knowler 1739, I: 269) He wrote no new theory of state. Nor do we have reason to believe that he had entirely abandoned the beliefs and views about the subjects' rights and the king's authority that he had voiced powerfully in the parliament of 1628. (Pace Zogorin 1986) Experience in Ireland undoubtedly affected Wentworth's reading of the unwritten constitution -- as had the experience of forced loan, billeting and imprisonment in 1628. But his desire for a continued harmony, his belief in it -- like the belief of most -- remained, even when, in certain circumstances, his actions appeared to threaten it. It was, as Burgess argued, the actions of Charles I and his ministers that caused concern. This failure to enunciate a new absolutist theory of state was not a refusal to go public with a hidden agenda, nor was the idea that 'truly mixed government [was] impossible' an absolutist notion. Certainly men differed in early Stuart England about the interpretation of the law and constitution but they did not write those differences into rival theories of state. There was 'not a clash of absolutists and constitutionalists.' (Burgess 1996, 209)

12. Milton co-authors, with Terence Kilburn, an essay that places the political debate about Strafford, and the larger question of prerogative and law, in the wider public sphere. This is a terrain largely neglected by revisionists like Russell. But as we are beginning to see more clearly, the Thirty Years War, the rise of the Corantos, the emergence of semi-professional newsmongers, and the culture of exchange of news and rumour greatly widened information (and misinformation) and debate about what had once been arcana imperii. (Cust 1984; cf. Sharpe 1992, 683ff, Raymond [forthcoming]) Entrepreneurs were quick to cash in on the expanding market for news and circulated, and recycled, speeches, stories and rumours about topical events and manoeuvres. Whether they approved of it or not, the leading political actors had to respond to the existence of an informed public opinion; MPs especially addressed an audience beyond Westminster as 'separates' of speeches were rushed into print. We need to think more carefully than we have about how consciousness of that wider public influenced rhetoric and politics in the house. After a decade with effectually no parliaments, the appetite for news of the session that sat down in November 1640 was insatiable. The Earl of Strafford's trial that dominated its proceedings was a media as well as a parliamentary event. The playing to the gallery, however, was evidently very much more a strategy of Strafford's prosecutors than of the earl himself who was 'constructing a tightly argued legal defence which eschewed vigorous rhetoric or appeals to the broader nation.' (Merritt 1996, 239) As a consequence Strafford won the legal defence but lost the battle for public opinion. Anti-Strafford pamphlets, rehearsing the rhetoric of advice against favourites such as Buckingham, demonised the earl as the evil personification of the ills of the Caroline regime. The death of Strafford did not, however, see a simple victory for his enemies. His appeal to law struck a chord with some; he went to the block not with the traditional last dying speech confessing his sins but with protestations of his innocence. So concerned were the prosecutors that they forged and published a speech in which Strafford approved the conduct of the trial and obliged with admissions of his guilt. Both the forgery and his actual words circulated, licensing a public that was increasingly dividing, to make its different judgments. There are important points here that deserve to be developed, and even theorized. Strafford's trial marked a turning point in the loyalists' sense of the need to appeal to a wider public, in the valence of the law as a discourse for resolving issues, and in the public reception of various 'authorized' texts -- all of which were to change the way authority was represented, experienced and read. We therefore need to know more about the figures behind the pamphlets, about their distribution, consumption and reception. May we imagine the speeches, actual and forged, pro and con (published in the same volume) read alongside law books in the gentleman's study, enacted in the Inns of Court or Oxbridge colleges, burlesqued in the inns and alehouses? Did the publicly contested representations of law and authority not licence the subject to interpret and judge, to construct his (even her) conception of justice, law and peace? Such questions of representation and hermeneutics may offer important insights into the new politics of division and violence, and the articulation of popular and radical programmes. 6

13. With such questions also we discern a new agenda for early modern England, and an opportunity to put to rest what has become a rather sterile exchange between Whigs, revisionists and their critics. In one of the best essays in this volume, Richard Cust shows how it is precisely that rigid historiographical polarization that has precluded a full comprehension of the complexities of Wentworth's career. To the Whigs, he was, and remains, a champion of liberties and parliaments who sold out for court office and advancement. To the revisionists, Wentworth was a paradigm of a consensual political culture who could not change sides because there were no sides to change. Was he then a champion of noble ideals or the personification of the revisionist model of intrigue and interest? Scores of publications from before the trial to now have argued pro and con. Cust rightly declines the choice. Wentworth, he shows, spoke the language of law and liberty, and also that of prerogative and untramelled authority. He deployed different discourses in different circumstances; he was a 'complex mix of idealism and calculation'; and his political identity was constructed and reconstructed through 'continual shifts and adjustments.' (Merritt 1996, 66, 77) Cust raises the question of Wentworth's sincerity but concludes it 'impossible to resolve'. Rather he presents a figure who was 'a paradigm of the choices and challenges faced by leading politicians', one who tried never to burn his boats with court or country. (Merritt 1996, 78) This is an invaluable contribution that makes sense of many other political actors -- not least, as I tried to argue some years ago, Sir Robert Cotton. (Sharpe 1997, Sharpe 1979) It also gestures to, but does not pursue, the wider question of a simultaneous perception of different languages and positions and belief that all or nothing choices did not have to be made. To the revisionists' critics we owe a reserved sense of that conflict of values; to the revisionists a sense that they had not yet hardened into opposites. Wentworth was able to make himself the 'acceptable face' of loan refusal, and so rise to royal counsels. The question remains could he in high office have sustained, as Pembroke seems to have, a credible representative of country values and positions? Cust intelligently reminds us that men like Wentworth were as much structured by political rhetoric as manipulators of it. How far was Wentworth as Lord Lieutenant still constructed by the values of the country he had expounded? Was he still, rather than Milton's absolutist, the 'complex mix' as he chose to present himself at his trial? Perhaps it was not only for the 1620s, that Wentworth does not fit 'one simple narrative or another.' (Merritt 1996, 63)

14. It is the wider historiographical and methodological questions with which Peter Lake closes the volume. For centuries, he argues, historical writing, be it Whig, Marxist, or liberal was dominated by a master narrative -- a narrative essentially of modernization. The revisionist challenge of the 1970s was not only a different interpretation; it questioned the entire method of presenting the past intelligently; and it threatened to take the 'meaning' out of history, as Stone revealingly put it. (Stone 1979) Stung by this charge, and still (necessarily?) caught in an intellectual culture that sought meaning in and through narrative, the revisionists slowly ventured towards other stories -- the religious narrative or story of the British problem. Lake, radically, suggests that we should instead, at least for a time, see the potential fruits of abandoning the master narrative. Instead he urges scholars to study moments, episodes that situate a political incident not in a longer narrative but a broader context -- of society, religion and culture. Such work, 'if brought to fruition', he presses, 'may well serve to redefine the boundaries of the political in this period, and to change the way political history is written.' (Merritt 1996, 272) The optimism is entirely appropriate but the caveat entirely necessary. I fully support the rejection of the false choice between Whig and revisionist and the call (that Lake and I made elsewhere) for a broader, reconfigured notion of politics and political history. (Sharpe and Lake 1994, introduction) But I do not agree that monographs on the forced loan or the Spanish match have laid down a model. Such microstudies are far too narrow in their contextual as well as chronological scope. As Steve Zwicker and I argue in Refiguring Revolutions, we need case studies of moments that reverberate from political into other histories and vice versa; we need to see how the Reformation marked a crisis in psychology as well as church politics, how civil war transformed gender politics as well as constitution, how the French revolution rewrote the Romantic pastoral as well as approaches to power. This is a more challenging agenda even than Lake posits; and it is one that insists on an interdisciplinary as well as cultural turn for early modern studies. (Sharpe and Zwicker 1997, introduction and passim)

15. It is here that this valuable collection on The Political World of Thomas Wentworth fails and disappoints. Milton acknowledges that 'a rounded portrait of Wentworth's political views would have to include discussion of his taste in portraiture, architecture and court ceremonial' -- but he says nothing of them. (Merritt 1996, 151-2) Julia Merritt mentions the palatial wing built at York, the plans for a huge residence in Dublin, but we learn little of them or the ceremonies, masques and entertainments to which he attached great importance. Cust and Milton refer to Wentworth's reading -- in Lipsius and Tacitus, Bodin and Du Plessis Mornay -- and to his self professed adherence to Stoic values, but never integrate them, nor Wentworth's axioms and adages, into a 'rounded portrait.' As for the Van Dycks of Wentworth, the rural squire with his hunting dog, the bureaucratic executor of royal policy, the military commander, these multiple and divergent visual constructions of Strafford receive here no discussion at all. Though we welcome in this collection a long overdue address to discourse and rhetoric, we lack a sense of Strafford as a Renaissance courtier, a Caroline courtier, a man concerned with his image and representation, a man for whom power was, in many ways, a matter of display.

16. The Political World of Thomas Wentworth is a collection penned at the end of a historiographical era. Some, like Cogswell and Russell, look back to old exchanges; others gesture to new approaches and questions. But Wentworth, and the age, remain here two dimensional. Only as we move to explore the political culture which figures like Wentworth made and were made by will we have the 'rounded portrait' of men like Strafford and of the English Renaissance state.

Notes

1. For Gardiner see Gardiner 1883-4 via index and especially D.N.B. ; Kearney 1959, Knowler 1739. Dame Veronica Wedgewood revised her biography (Wedgewood 1935, 2nd edn. 1962) in the light of the Wentworth Woodhouse manuscripts. See also Cooper 1973.

   

2. Cf. my comments in Remapping Early Modern England: from Revisionism to the Culture of Politics (forthcoming).

   

3. Wentworth to Cottington, Feb 1634, Wentworth Woodhouse Strafford Papers 3, 58. Wentworth may well have been echoing Laud's words, but he was quite capable of his own judgement.

   

4. We are reminded by Merritt (1996, 5) that few accused Wentworth of popery or represented him as a threat to Protestantism.

   

5. For Lake, see Merritt 1996, 279-283 and Merritt 1994, 57; also review article on Russell, Sharpe 1994.

   

6. Here, political historians need to pay more attention to the work on the culture of the book, and the reception of texts.

   

List of Works Cited

Burgess, Glenn. 1992. The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-42.

Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Burgess, Glenn. 1996.Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cogswell, Thomas. 1989. The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621-1624. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, John Phillips. Ed. 1973. Wentworth Papers 1597-1628. London: Camden Society 4th Series 12.

Cust, Richard. 1984. 'News and Politics in early seventeenth-century England.' Past and Present 112:60-90.

Cust, Richard. 1987. The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1621-1628. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gardiner, Samuel R. 1883-4. The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War

1607-42 10 vols. London: Longmans, Green.

Kearney, Hugh. 1959. Strafford in Ireland 1633-41: A Study in Absolutism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Knowler, William. Ed. 1739. The Earl of Strafford: Letters and Dispatches. 2 vols. London: William Bowyer

Morrill, John. 1994. 'A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical and Imperialism under the early Stuarts.' In Religion, Culture and

Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, edited by Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 209-37.

Merritt, J. F. Ed. 1996. The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford 1621-41. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Raymond, Joad. Forthcoming. The Invention of the Newspaper. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Russell, Conrad. 1990. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Russell, Conrad. 1992. The Fall of the British Monarchies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sharpe, Kevin. 1979. Sir Robert Cotton 1596-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Sharpe, Kevin. 1986. 'Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England.' English

Historical Review 399.

Sharpe, Kevin. 1992. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sharpe, Kevin. 1994. 'Religion, Rhetoric, and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England.' Huntington Library Quarterly

57:255-99.

Sharpe, Kevin. 1997. 'Rewriting Sir Robert Cotton.' In Sir Robert Cotton as Collector, edited by C. E. Wright. London:

British Library.

Sharpe, Kevin and Lake, Peter. Eds. 1994. Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Sharpe, Kevin and Zwicker, Steven N. Eds. 1997. Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English

Revolution to the Romantic Revolution. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Starkey, David. Ed. 1987. The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War. London: Longman.

Stone, Lawrence. 1979. 'The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History.' Past and Present 85:3-24.

Wedgewood, Veronica. 1935; 2nd ed. 1962. Strafford. London: Cape.

Zagorin, Perez. 1986. 'Did Strafford change Sides?' English Historical Review 101:149-63.